Super Typhoon Yagi on Friday made landfall in southern China, barrelling into the Hainan and Guangdong provinces. The storm is the biggest to hit Asia in more than a decade and has led to hundreds of thousands of evacuations and schools and businesses to be shut. Yagi claimed more than a dozen lives when it swept through the northern Philippines earlier this week.
A little more than an hour after Yagi’s arrival, Hainan saw power outages that affected 830,000 households in the province, the official news agency Xinhua said.
The provincial power supply department had put together a 7,000-member emergency team that would embark on repairs as soon as conditions permitted, Xinhua added. By Friday night, power to 260,000 households had been restored.
Ahead of Yagi’s arrival, the island known for its sandy beaches and glitzy hotels had cancelled flights and ferries, shuttered businesses and told its population of more than 10 million to avoid going out.
Yagi is the biggest storm in Asia so far this year and the world’s second-most powerful tropical cyclone of 2024 after Hurricane Beryl, which affected the U.S. Gulf Coast and parts of Mexico and the Caribbean in June and July.
The storm has left classes canceled, streets deserted, some 400,000 people evacuated and flights disrupted in the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, China’s island province of Hainan and Guangdong, China’s most populous province with about 125 million people.
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